One Woman Questions the Benefit of a Gender Switch in Finance - Building Gender Balanced Business

• There was sure to be a backlash, and from a woman, to the idea that more women in decision-making positions might lead to a better world. And here it is, in the pages of The Telegraph of London.

• Jemima Lewis writes, “I bow to no one in my admiration for my own sex, but this kind of talk makes me want to kick the sisterhood in the shins.”

• She questions the “received wisdom” that testosterone-fuelled traders caused the economic crisis, calling the idea that more women running financial institutions would have limited the damage “a wilful lack of self-knowledge”.

• Besides noting highly competitive and sometimes vindictive female leaders of the past, Lewis says there are “plenty of flawed female bankers -– even ‘superwoman’ Nicola Horlick allowed one of the funds she manages to invest heavily with the fraudulent Bernard Madoff”.

• “We may lack the testosterone surges that make little boys delight in smashing each other with sticks, but we are born – and remain – every bit as competitive, cruel and egotistical as them,” she concludes.

Jemima Lewis’s column in The Telegraph